Presentations Are Not Like Life: Part One

Presentations are not like life—they are more like art. In our lives we may strive for perfection. We want to bowl a perfect game or cook a perfect soufflé. We try to perfect our golf swing, our lawns, and even our families.

Strive for good in presentations and you may exceed it, but strive for perfection and you’ll surely hit the wall. No one will know about that perfect phrase you forgot to utter unless you tell them. No one will miss the beautiful slide you skipped until you apologize for it. In fact, no one except other artistic presenters will even notice your technique at all—perfect, good, or poor.

Voltaire said, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” A successful CEO I know added, “and the enemy of happiness.”

So be good and be happy. The quest for perfection breeds paralysis.

Margaret Krzeminski-Pacuku

Cross-Cultural Communication

Communication is often difficult enough on your own block, let alone across an entire organization. Cross-cultural communication only adds to the difficulty for multinational companies or those who do business internationally: the greater the mix of languages and backgrounds, the greater the confusion and likelihood of a communication breakdown.

The impact of cross-cultural miscommunication can be truly disastrous. The classic worst-case scenario involved a translation during World War II. Reporters asked the Japanese premier how he would react to the Allies’ demand for surrender. He replied, “Mokusatsu.” This response so infuriated the Allies that, shortly after, Hiroshima was bombed.

But what did the premier really say? Mokusatsu can be translated anywhere from the benign “no comment” to the more combative “treat with silent contempt.”

The take-away here is not so much a cautionary tale for translators as it is a reminder to separate our emotions from the message. “Hearing what you want to hear” is natural, and indeed habitual, but it may not be prudent—especially when the sender and receiver share little in the way of knowledge and experience.

A wise man once told me, “Every situation is neutral.” We would do well to remember that sage advice when our emotions start to color the communication.

Margaret Krzeminski-Pacuku

Communication Skills are Like Milk

Your budget is nonexistent. All discretionary expenses have been eliminated. Travel and training are axed for the remainder of the year.

In the current economic environment, companies are hunkering down, cutting anything and everything. While this approach makes sense for routine items like office supplies, color copies, and catering, employee development is not expendable. Communication skills are like milk—they expire.

Some companies are relying on internal departments to provide the services that vendors offer. But with resources already stretched to the limit, how can HR handle your request for just-in-time presentation skills training for the sales reps? Off-the-shelf seminars won’t do the trick and employees can’t be expected to go it alone.

Meanwhile, presentations are still taking place, except now they are virtual because of the ban on travel. Employees who had hardly mastered in-person delivery are now struggling to communicate with a remote audience. Without new techniques, these presentations come across as little more than slideware with a soundtrack.

When you consider the impact of a year’s worth of stale or spoiled communication on your clients, can you afford not to invest in training?

Margaret Krzeminski-Pacuku

Career Bilingualism

More and more companies need graduates of the hard and applied sciences. As students, these new scientists and engineers received technical training in their disciplines but not preparation for careers in industry.

Career bilingualism is the key to success in business for anyone with a science or engineering background. Along with speaking “technical,” these new hires need to speak the language of those who will help foster their career development: managers.

Being monolingual, or able to speak only one language, is a liability to anyone who seeks mobility. Just as a true bilingual enjoys twice as many opportunities for work, travel, and connection as a monolingual, the career bilingual is more likely to move either up or off the technical ladder. He or she is seen as a member of the technical and corporate communities and has credibility with both.

Technical people in industry must be fluent in both technical and corporate communication to advance. But they must also be career bicultural and know when and how to switch.

Fortunately, unlike with real languages, career bilingualism and biculturalism can be gained in days—that is with the proper training.

Margaret Krzeminski-Pacuku

Graphophobia* for Grown-ups

Have empathy for those people who never liked writing. They are at a disadvantage on the job.

People join organizations to perform certain tasks but soon discover that to communicate with their peers, they have to master the politics of e-mail. To gain visibility or get credit for their work, they must prepare reports that their managers can understand. To appear credible and professional, they need to produce documents free from all grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors.

Here’s an analogous scenario. Let’s say you are hired to work in your field. Within the first few days on the job, your supervisor informs you that you should expect to spend at least 50% of each day doing algebra. While you had studied algebra in high school, you weren’t very good at it. Now you can barely remember it.

Then you find out that you are going to be evaluated by your algebra skills—that your rating, ranking, salary, and chances of promotion will directly hinge on your algebra—skills that you didn’t even pretend to possess!

That’s what’s happening to people today. It is hardly fair that the success of their careers can depend on skills they haven’t developed.

Business writing training can level the playing field and give reluctant writers the confidence boost they need. Better writing + faster turnaround = more time for tasks (– frustration).

*Graphophobia is the fear of writing.

Margaret Krzeminski-Pacuku

Who’s Responsible for Communication?

I was his English instructor at the university, but he hardly needed one. As he spoke, I noticed his excellent eye contact. He was leaning forward over the table, as was I. His hands and arms were gesturing meaningfully and emphatically, mirroring my gestures. I realized he was listening actively when he began to paraphrase some things I said.

He was an executive for a Japanese pharmaceutical company and the best example I'd seen of native-like communication from a non-native speaker.

I asked him, “How did you know how to do all of this?”

He smiled and said, “I figured it out a little while ago. In English the responsibility for communication is on the speaker.”

“That’s exactly right,” I replied. “Or the writer. If someone sends an e-mail to five people and no one understands it or if each reader understands it differently, the writer is to blame.”

He continued, “In Japanese it’s just the opposite. When I am listening to a presenter speak in Japanese, I’m constantly asking myself, ‘What is his real opinion? What is he going to say next?’ I like to figure it out.”

I said, “No American is going to put that much energy into listening. You’ve got to follow the ‘tell them what you’re going to say, say it, then tell them what you just said’ advice. You've got to be direct.”

“That’s what I try to do,” he said. And that was the secret to his success.

Margaret Krzeminski-Pacuku

The Challenge of Communication

Recently I was coaching a senior manager at a multinational company. He was frustrated that his culturally and linguistically diverse team of engineers couldn’t communicate effectively. Rather than signing off on their recommendations, his valuable time was spent synthesizing their data (“millions of pieces” as he put it) into something usable for himself and his peers.

Similarly, the managers had their own trouble communicating with the engineers. He said, “When we tell them that we’re going to explain it from a top-down perspective, they think we’re yelling at them.”

Why is communication such a challenge? A professor of mine at Georgetown had a saying: “People don't think they understand anatomy just because they have a body the way they think speaking a language confers expertise in linguistics.” Substitute the word “communication” for “linguistics” and the problem becomes clear.

But the fact remains that few people innately understand how to communicate in a corporate setting. And it is not realistic to expect that hundreds of people from different backgrounds, languages, and positions will know how to communicate with one another.

The good news is that communication is a teachable skill—one that training can sharpen in a very short time.

Imagine that all employees in the organization did the task they were responsible for and then clearly reported it in speech or writing to managers who decided what action to take next. This kind of alignment may sound like wishful thinking, but it is possible with effective communication.

Margaret Krzeminski-Pacuku

Step Away From that Buffet!

I like to remind people that corporate communication and academic communication are two different animals. Academic communication—whether written or spoken—often follows the “more is more” philosophy. However, communicating in a business setting requires a “less is best” approach. There simply is not time to go through an in-depth review of the details for every task, issue, and decision.

A couple of years ago a marketing VP for a large pharmaceutical company asked me, “Do you do anything about e-mail?”

He said, “It’s gotten so bad that now when I open an e-mail, I see if it’s longer than a paragraph. Then I delete it.”

I said, “You mean you stop reading after the first paragraph?”

He replied, “No. If it’s longer than a paragraph, then I don’t read any of it.” He shook his head and said, “I get over 400 e-mails a day.”

While most managers seem to get the “less is best” idea, front line staff and technicians need training to make the transition from the academic to corporate approach. The more years of education—master’s and Ph.D. degrees—the more necessary training becomes.

Using the academic style in business is like eating with the wrong utensil. It looks awkward and it just doesn’t work as well.

So remember, buffets are good for meals but bad for business communication. Serve up reasonable portions and wait for your audience to ask for more. Hopefully, they’ll choose the right fork!

Margaret Krzeminski-Pacuku